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Hey, brother. Hey, man. Good to see you again. Good to see you again. I feel like we do this all the time. Yeah. Last time was in Chicago, maybe? Yes. Yeah. And rooftop in LA and lots of cool places. Love it. So what's on your mind today? As we, I guess it was yesterday that we met to talk about what we're going to talk about. And one of the things you brought up that I found to be very interesting was this idea that there have been three key white papers in the past, well, I guess since 2008, that have really changed the world. The first one's pretty obvious. It is the Bitcoin white paper. There you go.
But perhaps you have some unique views on the Bitcoin white paper before we get into the other two? Sure. So I think one of the things that, for me, is having a background in mathematics and physics about the Bitcoin white paper is if you think about Bitcoin as digital gold, what is gold? Gold is actually mathematically a wave in a substrate called a vector bundle. And the idea that you've solved the double spend problem translates in physics to a conservation law, right? The idea is that something is destroyed here to be created over here. And you don't have this ability to, in some sense, increase it. The issue is that all of these conservation laws come from symmetry principles.
So one thing I would challenge the community is that Satoshi must have created a symmetry principle in order to create a conservation law. And does it stop there? Is it possible to port all of the features of the physical world into the digital layer, as Satoshi did for this kind of conserved wave? You have a token, and you may have a series, a wave of claims against it from the private keys that are held. And in some sense, try to think about gold and Bitcoin in a single framework, where effectively you've created some substrate and some wave for it to be digital gold. And I think that there's a lot of unexplored territory here.
But absolutely one of the most brilliant things that's happened in our lifetime, just forget the money aspect. It's simply an incredible intellectual innovation in decentralized computing that happens to work great as money. Or you guys wouldn't be here all these years later with all the attacks against you. So cool look of vote. All the honor to you. Thank you. Yeah, I like a description you've shared before. It's like a bridge between the logical and the physical domain. And that's pretty important for a society that's moving into the digital age, clearly. Yeah, one advertisement. I wrote an essay on Bitcoin when I didn't buy it in 2010 called Go Virtual, Young Man. And we were trying to get prime brokerage.
And nobody would do prime brokerage for Bitcoin then. So we gave up on the project. Definitely one of the dumbest things I've ever done. But you can see the hope that was inspired because that was the hope back in 2010. Now the second white paper is one you told me about titled Attention Is All You Need from 2017. I had never heard of this. But apparently it was instrumental in the AI revolution that we are perhaps moving into today. Can you tell us a little bit about that white paper? It's hard. It's hard. But isn't it interesting that you're all talking about chat GPT and how suddenly computers can seemingly do so much of what we thought was intrinsically human.
And yet, can I have an honest show of hands, how many of you have never heard of Attention Is All You Need? Just be honest. Isn't that remarkable that we're not sharing what caused that explosion. You're sort of on the retail end of this. And you know, we Jews have a horrible joke. Why did God create the non-Jews? Well, somebody had to pay retail. We can't be in the retail. Can't believe I told that in a mixed audience. The thing is, I don't want any of you thinking about this from a retail perspective. Come to the wholesaler, which is reading what changed in the architecture. So this has to do with something called transformers.
And there were certain kinds of neural networks that were pretty inefficient and difficult to train. And Attention has something to do. If you think about a very long sentence, there are different regions of the sentence. How do those regions fit together and how can you sort of parallelize the training of this artificial mind? The Attention is All You Need paper came up with a hyper-efficient way of making sure that the different regions got the attention that they needed so that you didn't have a trailing off of interest. And that new architecture started to show us something which I think we haven't really digested, which is very disturbing. We keep talking about AGI, Artificial General Intelligence.
The idea is that we are supposedly generally intelligent and the computers are not actually intelligent because you can see all they're doing is some linear algebra, followed by a little bit of nonlinear function theory. So we know what they're doing. We can't figure out why it looks like us exactly. In other words, we can't go into the neural net and say, oh, well this part of it is doing this and that is doing that. Well, what's going on is it turns out that most of what we do is not very intelligent. So we had a conceit about ourselves that we're thinking all the time, we're being creative all the time.
And in fact, mostly you can finish each other's, right? And so the whole idea is, thank you guys for that, I really appreciate it. What's going on is that for the most part, we're just doing the same thing we did yesterday. We have the same conversational patterns. And when somebody says something new, we tend to call them a grifter. We tell them that they're an attention hog or they're whoring for clicks, all of these things. And mostly what we want to do is repetitive activity. And what this is doing is it's eating our lunch. It's correctly figured out that most of what we do is not generally intelligent, it's just repetitive.
And so when you train your children in school, what you're really doing is putting them in the crosshairs of artificial intelligence. Because a computer program spends its time in two separate sections, loops and parts that only happen once. And if you stop a computer program with a debugger, you'll almost always stop it in a loop. That's where computers spend almost all their time, in repetitive behavior. And so excellence, and what we do in school in general, trains you to do something that a computer will do better than you will. And so think very carefully about what you want to train your children to do. Think about how much of your day is actually spent in non-intelligence.
You know, and I met a guy backstage who had an idea about putting bitcoin in computer hardware so that when you needed to recover the machinery at the end, there was, you know, something that paid for it and it gave you an incentive not to just throw it into the world as trash. And I said, that's genius. And he said, oh no, no, no, no. And I said, no. Every act of creation is a violent act, which is difficult to do. So think about what portion of your day you're actually doing something that's never been done, even if it feels minor to you.
And take your own genius seriously, because this thing is going to eat your repetitive behavior that you thought was your highest end product. But really what this paper did was allowed us to parallelize things, make it much more efficient so that you didn't have to have these dependencies. And then what we find is that every sentence that we speak can be tokenized. And then it's just an input-output machine where you say, if this is the input, what has been the output? And you let the thing read some giant corpus of text. And so it turns out that that's pretty good to fool us into thinking that we were intelligent all along. And the big discovery is mostly we're not. Whew.
While we're on the topic of. . . These are the nicest people aren't they? Bitcoiners are the best. Aren't there any Maxis out here? Any Maxis? While we're on the topic of artificial intelligence, if we could speculate on the implications of this a bit, what does it mean when we move into a world that all of the professional services that many people are providing today, attorneys, accountants, et cetera, investment bankers, a lot of that appears it will be eaten by the software, right? I think AIs are already passing the bar exam, for example. What's left for humanity? And is that a net benefit or is that a negative? This is like the most dangerous great question.
What's happening is that capitalism and communism, you thought were rivals and capitalism won and communism lost. But it's really like Thelma and Louise going over the cliff and the question is who hit the ground first? It was communism. Whatever is coming next isn't going to be capitalism or communism. And we have to be thinking as Adam Smith thought, as Hayek thought, as Mark thought about something new. And some of those things are not going to work. But the key point is always machinery and technology have chased humans into higher value activities. Well, the high value activities that may be left might be like human touch. You don't want to go to a robot therapist. Maybe you do.
Maybe robot therapists are going to be better. But my point would be that this is enough to break labor markets for sure. And it's enough to break education. And it's probably enough to break certain parts of capitalism. And so what I challenge you guys to do is think about if you weren't hamstrung into these old paradigms. Capitalism versus communism is an old issue. This thing changes labor markets. And you and I have talked.
If you have something technical that you call market failure that used to be a small slice of the pie and then it suddenly expands to become an enormous slice of the pie, you can't tax the stuff that works in markets to pay for the small stuff that doesn't. So whatever it is, we need your brains coming up with an entirely new economic system. I don't know its name. But I think that you'll find, my wife has this beautiful thing. She says this is the golden age of AI complementarity where you engineer a prompt, the machine does something, you realize it's not exactly what you want. You go re-engineer the prompt and the two of you converge.
This is when humans and machines played chess together. That's a temporary issue. Take the period of time where you have that and try to innovate something so that we don't get crushed because K versus L, capital versus labor, is going to get very ambiguous very quickly. Interesting. Okay, the third white paper. Uh-oh. This one's interesting. I guess I should mention. Bitcoin white paper published 2008, Attention Is All You Need published 2017. The third one is the Project Diffuse Grant Proposal. And this was published in 2018. What is this third one all about, Mr. Weinstein? Oh, boy. Okay. Raise your hand if you've absolutely never had COVID. Most of you guys got taken out. I did.
I did. Okay. We do not know whether Project Diffuse run by a hippie charity called the EcoHealth Alliance, practicing something called One Health, has something to do with the origin of COVID. Now, I'm not telling you that this white paper actually caused all of you to get sick. I am telling you that it is an incredible coincidence that a group active in Wuhan, China, talking about furin cleavage sites in spike protein in bat coronaviruses was proposing something that looks eerily like the coronavirus that was in your child's lungs. There are 13 letters in my first and last name. Now, there are four amino acids in the furin cleavage site, each of which requires three nucleotides to code for you in your DNA.
That would be 12 letters. Try to imagine that with far less information than is in my name, we shut down planet Earth. That is the issue of leverage. All three of these white papers, Robert, are incredibly high leverage discoveries. And most people cannot imagine a short paper completely transforming planet Earth. But that furin cleavage site is the secret to the virality of the COVID virus. The spike protein is particularly important, and this tiny region of DNA, of nucleic acid coding was enough to make this thing spread like wildfire.
So even if this white paper was not the origin of COVID, and even if it came from a pangolin or a wet market or a civet cat or whatever, we now know how little it takes to completely change everything. And if you think about Bitcoin as programming, this is programming in a different language. Do you speak Haskell? Do you speak Python? Do you speak nucleic acid? It takes almost no change in nucleic acid. What's more, we've distributed this platform, this corona platform, worldwide. I'm very focused on a particular island in the South Atlantic called St. Helena. I don't know if anybody's been to St. Helena, but if there was ever a gulch, you should check out St. Helena.
It makes a perfect gulch. It was COVID free because it had a very strong perimeter during this pandemic. But almost nothing escaped. And one of the things that you guys don't understand, people say, are you a Bitcoiner? And I say, well, you guys are a little communistic for me. And you say, well, what do you mean we're communistic? Well, you're willing to share an atmosphere with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which I'm not. And if you think about all of the way of privatizing property rights, your land might be defensible. But your atmosphere is shared. We are all breathing each other's air. And my concern is that this last one was not the Spanish flu.
It was not the super deadly pandemic, like the plague, that we could have had. But it is a giant warning shot across your bow that you cannot get confirmation as to whether or not the United States government was in some ways active in a biological weapons convention workaround using the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases. If you took out the word allergies, it would be the National Institute of Infectious Disease. And it would be much clearer to you that it probably has something to do with the rules and restrictions we placed on ourselves through the Geneva Convention and through the Biological Weapons Convention. And you'll notice that Anthony Fauci was in the same role for approximately the length of time that J.
Edgar Hoover was at FBI. I think one of the things that we're in danger of finding out is the truth. We have a lot of very old people. And it's typically thought that they're clinging to power because they're power crazy. And I want to throw out a different possibility. The different possibility is that there are a lot of secrets that are holed up inside of our government. And we yell at people as conspiracy theorists and paranoids and lunatics like you all, but not me. And it may be that there are a lot of secrets that are going to change your entire conception of your country, your planet, your world, your safety, and what threat your family is under.
One of the reasons that I'm hopeful in talking about these white papers, we came to this as I think it was a great call on your part, is that a white paper can also be hope. A white paper can change everything for the better. The ability to stop sharing an atmosphere with Putin and Xi and various other people that I would prefer not to be, because we have three things we have to worry about. Radiation travels in the atmosphere. Pathogens travel in the atmosphere. And climate, even though we lie about climate, we still have climate issues. Don't be fooled just because we're lying about it, that climate's totally safe. In all of these cases, what Elon says is true.
We need to make sure we're diversified. And the communalism of your atmosphere and your oceans is a remnant of your communistic tendencies. If you're willing to accept that, recognize that we may need to spread out and have more spheres. And we have no idea how to do this, because inside of our solar system, there are three rocks that are sort of possible, the moon, Mars, and this beautiful planet of Earth. Chemical rockets can only reach these. In order to get out of the solar system, you need what? A change in physics. And you're not working on physics, and you're not endowing physics departments. And I came with Avi Loeb last year to talk about this.
If you want to stop your communism, you're going to have to come up with a large number of habitable spheres that do not share resources, because one change in the furrow and cleavage site proves how vulnerable we are. Is there a white paper that changes physical law that stops us believing that we live in space time, which is merely a map and not the underlying territory? I don't know. But if you guys are the big dogs, and I want to say this very clearly, I'm here this year in part, it's smaller, we got kicked in the teeth, and it's more intense because a lot of the froth got blown off. And we have a very strong underlying core.
So first of all, give yourselves a round of applause for appearing here now. If you're going to be the big dogs, it's not enough to think about personal freedom. You're going to have to start endowing things. One thing Robert and I did is we went to the University of Chicago to Milton Friedman's old seminar. And what would it mean for the Bitcoiners to start endowing chairs of economics with some ability to direct the field? You guys are giving up certain opportunities which will allow your freedom-based approach to change everything. So what about a white paper, for example, that examines how a small capital outlay could fundamentally shift the entire economics profession towards an understanding that we may need to move away from fiat.
And then we were talking about inflation earlier. I think that's another white paper that's probably important that hasn't been written exactly. Yes. Yeah. A lot of great points there. First, I'd like to say we're going to need a new word for this Weinstein brand of libertarianism where we all get our own planet. That's taking private property to a whole new level. So I really hope that comes to pass. Sounds crazy, but then again, so does digital gold. Yes, indeed. Before inflation, should we talk about the discovery of the neutron? Sure.
Part of what we're talking about here in these white papers is you said the novel inventions or discoveries or proposals that radically change the world by very high leverage points in time. And an analogy that you drew upon in our preparations for this was the discovery of the neutron and how that led us into the nuclear age. And now, I mean, I guess we could just look at AI as the most recent discovery or invention, leading us into a potentially unimaginable future. So, and then feel free to segue into inflation whenever you like. I like the discovery of the neutron story. So we discovered the neutron in 1932. I think it was Chadwick. Maybe it had been proposed by Rutherford.
And immediately, it sets off an intellectual chain reaction. The neutron leads to a proposal of chain reactions by Lise Meitner, chemist, incredible woman working, I think, in Germany. Enrico Fermi at Chicago comes up with Chicago Pile 1, first controlled nuclear reaction. Oppenheimer takes the ball to the Trinity test. We drop two devices on our enemy in World War II, Japan, proving this in the field. And then Teller and Ulam come up with the idea that the bomb that we drop in Japan is only the detonator for the mega bomb, which takes the shock wave and refocuses it and leads not to fission but to fusion.
So within 20 years from 1932 to, I think it's November of 52 with Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb, we become gods, whether we like it or not. We have the power and responsibility of gods. Nobody has ever seen fusion on the surface of a planet before. And suddenly, within living memory, we see something that only happens on the sun happen in the Pacific. That's how fast things move when you have a deep insight. And the idea that you're trapped here and that you think that you will never get off this planet and do anything really significant within our lifetimes is because you've grown up inside of a stagnation. Your entire lives have basically been in a stagnation.
This is not real life. All your memories are in a bubble. And I don't know how to say this. What WTF happened in 1971 is really what WTF happened in the early 70s, and it's not just the gold standard. It's not just Bretton Woods. It was predicted by Derek DeSola Price. It's a slowdown in the exponential increase in technology and science. And as a result, we don't realize that between 1902 and 1952, that 50-year span is effectively 10,000 years. Things change so much. In this span of 50 years, things have been highly stagnant except for a tiny number of areas, digital being one of them. So we do see things like Bitcoin.
That seems to be coming to an end. I've called this the Great Nap. And more or less since 1945 or 1952, we haven't seen early 20th century events on those scales except for the disaster of Mao's Great Leap Forward. So we have a wrong idea about war, about our safety, about what's possible, about how fast things can change. I will point out that there were people who saw action in the Civil War who lived to see Ivy Mike, the first H-bomb in the Pacific. So in some sense, the Civil War was almost a nuclear holocaust. Think about it, it's hard to conceive.
With respect to inflation and the monetary supply, it's very interesting that at the exact same moment there was a huge spike in M1, there was also a change in the reporting requirements. So if you say, look at this graph, every academic will pat themselves in the back and say, oh, you don't realize there was a discontinuity in the time series, that means nothing. Now think about this. That means any time I want to jack up M1, all I have to do is change a reporting requirement and all the academics will pat themselves in the back saying, oh, you can't use that series because of a discontinuity. What's more, what's going to tell the impact of changing the monetary supply? It's the BLS's computation of CPI.
And you guys are incentivized to think about, oh, the number was 7. 2, 6. 8, which is insane. If I said that the temperature in the United States was 68 degrees or 68. 25, you'd say, what are you talking about? I want to see a map. It's a field concept. Every meteor, I say field, I was talking to Saylor last night and he said it's too complicated to say what it really is, which is an element of a group. Inflation is a group element. He says too complicated. I say it's a field. Well, that field is a concept that everybody who watches television meteorology knows.
They see maps, they see pressure systems, they see temperatures, and we're all sitting around like absolute morons pretending that this number means something. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims to have moved to a cost of living standard, which is hysterical. That's a very technical concept. It means that you know the tastes of somebody, how much they prefer coffee to tea. And so if they can shift their preferences, you don't need to pay them as much in a cost of living adjustment because they are going to shift what they buy. If you're indifferent between beer and wine and the price of wine goes up because of grape harvests, you just buy beer. We don't have to pay you more money.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not maintain taste data. This is a giant catastrophic lie that is so big. Within the economics profession, it's like labor shortages. You've probably read about the labor shortages in technology. There are no labor shortages in market economies because supply and demand adjust. I have a Bugatti shortage. Why? Because I don't feel like paying for a Bugatti, right? So my point to you all is you're living with absolutely transparent institutional lies, but you're participating in the game every time you try to guess the CPI release. And so what you're seeing is you're going to have to take over this conversation.
You're going to have to say, look, we don't exactly know what you did because you screwed up the time series, but that was the wrong moment to change the reporting requirements. If you're going to say cost of living, where's the taste data? Call the CONUS, CONUS-LAS-PARES index. Get technical, get informed, endow some chairs and realize that these white papers have been very frightening in some cases and very liberating. You're here because of a white paper. And the thing is, is that we've got to stop pretending that Bitcoin is perfect.
We have to realize that it's up to us to continue to innovate, to build not only on top of it with things like lightning, but to actually think about what is this technology, how do we use the wealth that it's generated, not only for personal freedom, but also for societal freedom. And I want to say one thing about this. Oh, thanks. You guys are the best. They don't know how powerful this technology is or the violence, the threat of violence against you would be much greater. If you want Bitcoin to survive, the problem isn't with Bitcoin. The problem is that you're vulnerable to threats of violence.
And so if you're not going to cough up your keys with a gun to your head, that's fine, but very few people are willing to make that tradeoff. This is the time to figure out how to infect the system in a positive way. Instead of viewing them as the enemy, think about mitochondria inside your cell. If that's a captured bacteria, try to imagine it as an infection. If you tried to pull the mitochondria out of your cells, you'd take away your ability to produce ATP through ATP synthase. In other words, the infection is absolutely essential to life itself.
Now is the time to try to infect the system with something positive rather than treating it as the enemy so that when it comes with violence to try to shut you down for holding this instrument, it finds that it can't because it's actually dependent upon you. So that's my hope for this crypto winter is that when you appear to be weak, when they write articles about how your conference has shrunk, when they try to make fun of you, have fun getting poor, right? Don't listen.
Use the winter, take the opportunity, run like mad, and try to infect the system in a positive way rather than viewing them as the enemy so that they come to thank you later for the infection just the way your cells think it's mitochondria for making life possible. Eric Weinsan. Robert Breedlove. Thank you for always inspiring us Bitcoiners to hire in greater action. It's not enough just to stack sats and sit and wait. We have to take action. So thank you. Let's try to make it happen. All right. All right, brother. I see. Bitcoiners, welcome back to Bitcoin 2023. This is the Bitcoin Magazine Live Desk sponsored by Marathon.
I am joined by my esteemed co-panelists at the end, Ben Askren, the mixed martial artist, Chris Cyborg, the Grand Slam champion, and then Kenny Florian, former UFC broadcaster. We just listened to Eric Weinstein and Robert Breedlove give a very big brain gigachad talk, definitely something I'm going to need to watch a few more times. But in the beginning, Eric was talking about what's going to hit the ground first, capitalism or communism? He said communism obviously hit first, capitalism's almost there, and he's a little worried about what's next to come. Is a Bitcoin standard the next thing to come? I'll kick it over to you, Ben. Well, I don't see why capitalism and a Bitcoin standard can't coexist.
And one of the things that when we think of capitalism is, I was thinking about this a lot reading Alex Gladstein's book about the IMF. Capitalism doesn't really exist in its truest form, right? Because the IMF gives a loan to a poor country in exchange for that country then hiring some firms, right? Those firms aren't picking the ones they want to pick. They're picking the ones they're forced to pick, right? So it's not true capitalism. So I don't see why a Bitcoin standard and capitalism can't coexist. Yeah, we definitely have crony capitalism right now. So Eric was calling Bitcoiners too communistic for me.
He said because we share the same air as the CCP and basically said we all need our own planets. Chris, what are your thoughts? Is Bitcoin a communist thing or is Bitcoin a good thing? I'd love your thoughts, Chris. I believe Bitcoin is a good thing. I believe it's a freedom for the people and limit it. I really enjoy having the Bitcoin. Definitely. It's not enough for a person to think of personal freedom, but to endow rulers is something that Eric was saying. He said Bitcoin is rules without rulers. Kenny, I'd love your thoughts on basically Eric's ideology trying to force us to implement rulers. What are your thoughts on that? He wants to implement rulers over Bitcoin or. .
. Yeah, he was saying basically that he was like, it's not enough to just like Bitcoin to be on its own. He's like, this is your opportunity to strike and basically to implement, I think, a finance minister is kind of what he was saying. When has it ever gone wrong when humans get involved? I think that's brilliant. No, I strongly disagree with that. I mean, listen, we're in the situation we're in because humans have screwed it all up. And I think that's what makes Bitcoin so powerful, right? Is we do not have to rely on the faults of humans to make poor mistakes, to be corrupted by the money itself. It is ruled by math and it's absolute and truthful.
So yeah, I think this is why Bitcoin is what it is. I think to inject humans into the equation, I think only make it more complicated and more screwed up. Yeah, definitely. He also mentioned WTF happened in 1971. That is a great website. I recommend people go checking it out beforehand. But he basically said from 1971 to about 2020 or 2021, he said we've basically seen 10,000 years of growth, but he says he believes the next 50 years are going to be more stagnant. But those of us on a Bitcoin standard have. . . I thought he said this 50 years was stagnant and the next is going to be huge. Oh, well, yeah.
Yeah, I think that's what he's implying. But basically, do you see being on a Bitcoin standard, we're seeing all this growth? Yeah, maybe the conference has gone down in size, but we've seen a growth in the network. We've seen blocks still keep coming in. Ben, to you. Well, I want to go back to the endowing the chairs at economics universities. I feel like Bitcoin is different and we don't need to play the old game and we can play our own game. And I think a lot about what they're doing in El Salvador. That's a script flip. That was Naib saying IMF, get lost. We're not playing your game. We're going to play a little bit of a different game.
And I don't see why we can't do that. Like, why do we need old institutions to validate our thoughts that we're having right now? Why can't we do it a little bit of a different way and that still be valid? Yeah, definitely. He was basically calling out a lot of the media companies that are publishing that this event has shrunk and calling them have fun getting poor, referring to Bitcoiners. But he says, take their criticism and grow the network and propagate. And this is our time to build in the crypto winter, as he called it. Kenny, your thoughts on that.
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think what it comes down to is we need to build our own ecosystem, build our own thing, and get people to play our game, kind of like what Ben said. And yeah, I think it's a real possibility. I think that not only game theory will indicate that ultimately they will do that, but I think people are, throughout time, are looking for the best technology in whatever it is. And I think Bitcoin will ultimately prove that it is the best technology. And I think there's still a lot of education to happen on that. Definitely. We're about to go back to the Nakamoto stage. Stick with us after this short break.
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